Course description
This intensive reading and writing workshop is for students who want to immerse themselves in the long essayistic tradition in order to make their own contributions to it. Reading ancient and modern masterworks from The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, and select contemporary pieces from the latest Best American Essays, edited by Leslie Jamison, gives students models to follow (and to break away from) in their own work. Accomplished professional essayists and editors also visit the class. Past visitors have included Steve Almond, Leah Hager Cohen, James Geary, Jerald Walker, and Joan Wickersham. By building on the prose skills that they bring to the course and drawing on the feedback of their classmates, students cultivate their own voices as essayists.
